The Evolution of Fear

Part I

1

No Difference the Instrument

30th October 1994: North coast of Cornwall, United Kingdom

It was a good place to hide. From almost any vantage the cottage was invisible. Notched into a wooded draw at the top of the bluff, accessible only on foot, the place looked as cold and dead as the Devonian slate and mudstone cliffs from which it was made. Forty minutes now he’d been watching the place, as dusk faded and night came, but he’d seen no one, nothing to suggest danger. Just the crash of the waves on the shingle beach below, the whip of wind through the trees.

Claymore Straker shivered, pulled up his collar and watched the storm come in off the Irish Sea. Rain clouds scuttled overhead, low and fast, moving inland over the gorse and the stunted, wind-bent trees. The first drops touched his face, the cold fingertips of a tenhour corpse. Winter was coming, and he was a fugitive.

Eight and a half weeks he’d been here, anchored into the cliffside, staring out at the grey solitude of the sea, watching the depressions deepen. Fifty-nine days, one thousand, four hundred and twenty-two hours not knowing where she was, not knowing if she was alive or dead, uncertainty burning away the very fibre of him. And today he’d cracked. He’d succumbed to worry and fear and he’d walked all the way to Crackington Haven, fifteen miles across the national park. Defying Crowbar’s orders, he’d gone into the village, found a public phone, and he’d made a call. Just one. And now he was more worried than ever.

Clay hefted his bug-out bag onto his shoulders and started towards the cottage. The path tunnelled down through a tangle of wind-shaped scrub, the branches closing over him as he went. Hands reached out from the darkness, snatched at his clothes. A thorn caught his cheek, nicked open the skin under his left eye. He cursed, bent low and followed the track as it swung back towards the cliffs. By the time he emerged from the thicket, the rain was coming hard and flat, squalling over the bluffs. He raised the stump of his left forearm over his eyes, trying to shield his face from the icy darts. There was the dark outline of the slate roof, the chimney pot just visible, the low stone wall that enclosed the small courtyard.

He had just moved into open ground when the clouds broke. Moonlight bathed the cliffline like a parachute flare. And there, just outside the cottage door, the back-lit silhouettes of two men.

Clay stopped dead. A gust raked through the scrub, a loud tearing as a sheet of rain whipped over the bluff. The men were only metres away, blurs in the slanting rain. They were looking straight at him. Seconds passed, slowed to the tick of insect wings in a childhood dream, then stalled completely in chrome-white illumination.

Surely they’d seen him.

One of the men shifted, shook the rain from his coat. A voice rose above the wind. Clay couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was calm, unhurried. As if commenting on the weather. Or the football scores. And in that moment, as the realisation came to him that perhaps these men were simply lost, walkers strayed from the park, he thought how powerful are the doubts we carry inside, how strong these prisons we make for ourselves.

He was about to raise his hand in greeting when the two men turned away and walked the few paces to the cottage. One bent to the lock, worked it a moment, then pushed open the door. The other pulled a gun and burst inside.

It was as if a gallows door had opened beneath his feet.

Adrenaline hammered through him. He wavered a moment, then sprinted to the wall and dropped to the ground. A loud bang from inside the cottage amped out through the open door – a gunshot? A door being kicked in? Clay pulled the .45 calibre Glock G21 from under his jacket, cradled it dry in his lap, worked the action. He remembered Crowbar slamming the gun on the table the day he’d left him here. Stay put, his old platoon commander had said. I’ll come get you when things calm. Whatever you do, stay clear of town. With that bounty on your carcass, every poes from here to Cape Town will be hunting you.

Clay swallowed hard then started along the base of the stone wall, keeping low. He reached the cottage, crouched and looked seaward across the courtyard. The door was less than five metres away. It was the only way in or out. He waited, listened, but all he could hear was the pounding of the surf and the wind buffeting the cliffs, and above it all the drowning crash of his own heart.

How the hell had they found him, here of all places? Had someone recognised him in town? He’d been in and out in less than twenty minutes. Who, other than Crowbar, knew about this place? Knew he was here? Questions boiled in his mind.

But he didn’t have time to think them through. The door opened and one of the men stepped out into the rain-swept courtyard. He was short and stocky, powerfully built, and wore a black, thigh-length raincoat and a black baseball cap. He took a few steps towards the wall, shoes crunching on the gravel. They were city shoes; must have been wet through. A pistol with a long silencer hung from his left hand. He stood for a moment looking out to sea. Clay raised the G21, steadied it on the stump of his left arm and aimed for the middle of the man’s chest.

Just then, the second man stepped out into the rain. He was taller, wore a dark jacket and was bareheaded. Slung across his chest was a Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistol. As Clay shifted his aim to take out the more heavily armed man first, the shorter man reached for his cap and pulled it off his head, slapping it against his thigh as he turned to face his companion.

‘Hy is nie hier,’ he shouted above the wind. ‘N’ volledige opfok.’

Clay’s heart lurched. The sound of his native tongue pierced something inside him. He’s not here, the man had said. A complete fuckup. He’d said it in Afrikaans.

‘Ja, maar hy was hier,’ said the taller man, looking out towards the bluff. But he was here.

The other man nodded. ‘Kan nie ver wees.’ Can’t be far.

Clay knelt behind the wall, the Glock trained on the man with the MP5. His hand was shaking. These were his countrymen, Boers by their accent, men who by their look and demeanour had in all probability fought against the communists in Angola and Southwest Africa, as he had. Their presence here, in the foresight of his gun on an autumn night on the north coast of Cornwall, seemed impossible, the ramifications a nightmare.

Clay knew he had to act quickly. He could run, disappear into the heathland, go west along the coast, give himself a head start. But they’d already managed to get this close. If he ran, they’d follow, just like they’d done with the SWAPO terrorists all those years ago, tracking them like Palaeolithic hunters, wearing them down with calloused feet, pushing them hour by hour towards the quicksand of exhaustion. It made no difference, the instrument: helicopters or spears, stones or high-powered assault rifles. Even, as he’d learned to his horror, back then during the war, the cocktails of muscle relaxants and incapacitating agents that shut down everything but your brain, suffocated you as you fell to the sea from four thousand metres, a silent scream drowning in your throat. Clay shuddered at the memory.

The tall man turned, looked down the track, readjusted the sling of his weapon so its muzzle pointed down, and said something to his companion that Clay could not make out. A gap opened in the clouds. Moonlight flooded the gravel courtyard again, pale as a false spring day. The two figures stood silhouetted against the hammered steel background. Clay breathed in, steadied his aim.

I did not ask you to come here, he said. I did not will this or want it in any way. I know why you are here, and I cannot let you leave. You have given me no choice. No choice.

He exhaled, squeezed the trigger.

The large-calibre slug hit the tall one between the shoulder blades, severing his spine. His legs collapsed under him and he sandbagged forward, inert, hands limp at his sides. Before the dead man’s face hit the gravel, Clay shifted left, aimed for the other target and fired again. This time to wound, to incapacitate, not to kill. The man spun right, fell to the ground. But then he was up, scrambling towards the cliffs, his feet flailing and slipping in the gravel. Clay was about to fire again when the lights went out, the moon suddenly obscured by a thick bank of cloud. The target was gone, black on black. Clay could hear the man scrabbling on the crushed stone. He aimed low along the wall of the cottage, fired blind once, twice, aiming at the sound: deflection shooting. Slowly his night vision returned. The tall one was where he’d fallen, face down, the rain pelting his back. Otherwise, the courtyard was empty.

2

2.7 Seconds of Nothing

Clay scanned the open ground beyond the wall. Nothing. Had he hit the other guy? The way he’d spun and fallen, Clay guessed yes. But he couldn’t be sure. Unarmed, the guy would try to run, if he could. But did he have a backup weapon? He might be hiding on the cliff side of the cottage, hurt, bleeding, waiting for Clay to come to him; or perhaps he was moving around the building now, trying to flank him.

The clouds had thickened, and the world was every shade of black, liquid and heavy, screaming out its anger at these desecrations, this waste. Clay leaned into the wind, almost blind, soaked. The cliff edge was a pace away. Waves exploded against the rock below sending chutes of sea spray hurtling up towards him, the foam black like the sky, the salt coating his lips, stinging his eyes. He turned and crouched, tried to cover his eyes, peered along the cliff edge. Nothing. Just the dark outline of the cambered roof, the low front wall built into the cliffside. Clay knew he had to move fast. By daylight, his chances of getting clear would fall away rapidly. Any hope he might have had of getting some information out of his would-be assassins was gone. At this point it was about one thing: survival.

Clay sprinted back to the courtyard and knelt beside the corpse. The rain had washed the bullet wound clean, sluiced the blood away over the gravel. He pushed the Glock into his waistband, flipped the MP5’s strap over the dead man’s head and pushed him over onto his back. The man’s eyes were open but his nose and teeth were smashed. Pieces of gravel pushed into the skin, the mouth, pierced through the bottom lip. It would have hurt like hell if he’d been able to feel anything when he hit the ground.

Clay grabbed the machine pistol, checked the action and flipped off the safety. The other man’s handgun was there in the gravel too. Clay picked it up, thrust it into his jacket pocket and sprinted towards the back of the cottage. Rounding the corner at a crouch, he moved along the landward wall. Here he was in the lee of the wind, shielded from the rain. At the far corner he paused, took a deep breath, raised the MP5 and rested the forestock on his stump. This was the fourth side of the building, the only place he hadn’t checked. If the guy was still close, this is where he’d be. Clay breathed out and pivoted around the corner, swinging the MP5 around and down the line of the wall, into the full fury of the wind.

seconds of nothing but gravity (g) and empty space to the shingle below.

The man had disappeared. Perhaps he’d fallen off the cliff and been dragged out to sea, taken by the storm. Or, with his friend down, he’d panicked and run. If so, he was probably making his way back to wherever they’d left the car. The nearest paved road was about three kilometres inland, paralleling the coast. Either way, Clay could be sure of one thing: word would be out fast, and they’d be closing in.

It was time to go, time to get back to Rania, find her and disappear for good. Keep that promise he’d made to her, to himself. Maybe change the trajectory of his life, find some of those things he’d been looking for, atone for the wrongs, one more just done.

Clay let the MP5 hang on its strap, turned back and made his way to the courtyard. He’d grab a few things from inside then sprint to the road. If he could find the car, he’d take that. If he couldn’t, he’d go overland on foot.

The men had left the cottage door open and the swirling wind had carried rain and dead leaves across the old slate floor tiles. Clay slipped as he came in, caught himself, started towards the fireplace. He’d taken three steps when a flash of movement caught the furthest edge of his vision.

Clay’s instinctive turn towards danger was less than one-eighth complete when the blow caught him high on the left shoulder, knocking him off his feet. He crashed to the floor, the MP5 flailing about his neck. A dull ache spread through his arm, replaced almost immediately by that acute precision of screaming nerves, hot and wet. He turned to see his assailant slam down hard onto the slate, forearms breaking the fall with a crack, a bloodied blade in his left fist. It was the gunman, the Boer from outside. He’d slipped as he lunged in attack, and now he grunted in pain, scrambled to his knees and dived at Clay, the blade flashing. Clay rolled left and whipped his arm across his body and down onto the man’s forearm, deflecting the blade and sending his attacker twisting to the floor. Clay followed through, driving the man’s knife hand down hard onto the slate flag. The knife spun across the floor. Clay groped for the MP5’s pistol grip. His finger found the trigger. He was about to raise the weapon for a shot when the Boer lunged. A burst roared out in the enclosed space. Rounds clattered off stone, splintered wood. The Boer hit him with a full body tackle, punching the air from his lungs. He came down hard on the slate. The Boer’s full weight was on him now. The pistol grip was gone from his hand. The Boer grabbed for the MP5’s forestock, wrenched it hard, jerking Clay’s head forward. They were face to face, inches apart, the smoking weapon wedged between their bodies. The Boer was trying to pivot the MP5’s muzzle down into Clay’s chest. Clay could feel the thing digging into his ribs. He twisted his torso and drove his hand into the space between their bodies and grabbed the weapon. As he did, the Boer bared his teeth like an enraged hyena, snapped his head forward. Clay turned his head just as the Boer’s jaw cracked shut, an enamel snap and the kiss of lips against his cheek. A kiss that would have taken away half his nose. Clay’s hand was on the pistol grip now. He found the trigger guard, prised away a finger, crushed it against the curved metal of the guard. The man screamed in pain. Then the shallow-grave rip of the MP5, its detonations muffled and drummed up through two chest cavities. Bullets shredded the kitchen cabinetry. Cordite stung his nostrils. For a fraction of a second they stared at each other, realising that somehow neither had been hit. Clay had his thumb wedged into the pull space behind the trigger now and jerked back hard on the pistol grip, hammering his knee into the man’s body. The Boer grunted, clamped down hard on the MP5. The guy was strong. Clay was winning the battle for the trigger but losing the fight for the gun. He tried to roll out, but the Boer outweighed him. He could feel the bastard’s breath on his face, smell the cigarettes and crap coffee. The gun’s barrel was coming down onto Clay’s throat, touching now, as the Boer levered his weight, still trying to pry Clay’s fingers from the trigger. Clay gasped for breath, pushed back with all his strength. He could feel the barrel crushing his windpipe. Pain seared through his brain, began its too-quick metamorphosis into panic. The Glock was there in his belt, he could reach it with his stump. If he still had two hands this would be over. But he didn’t, and it wasn’t. The Boer shifted his balance forward, putting all his weight into the MP5, trying to choke Clay to death, going for the kill.

There are moments in any struggle, any battle, when outcomes hinge on the thinnest line, a fraction of a degree. Now, Crowbar used to call it back then, during the war. The moment when winning or losing, living or dying, depended on what you did right now. Whatever Crowbar was, he was no fatalist. Nou, seuns, he’d yell, charging forward, R4 dispensing single-shot judgement on any who chose to stand and die. Now.

Clay raised his knees and pushed up hard against the floor, a powerful hip thrust that over-balanced his attacker, momentarily releasing the pressure on his neck. Clay arched his back, lined up the man’s head, and with every joule of energy he could summon, whipped his neck forward.

Clay’s forehead made contact with the man’s nose. The cartilage collapsed as if it were raw cauliflower. He could hear the crunch. Clay rolled away, twisting the MP5 on its strap and sending his attacker crashing to the floor. Clay gasped for air, fumbled for the MP5’s grip. By now the Boer was up, blood streaming black over his lips and chin. He stood a moment, frozen. A stab of moonlight flicked across the room. The man was fair-haired, with big, pale eyes set in anxious sockets and a heavy, farm jaw, a goddamned voortrekker if he’d ever seen one. Clay raised the MP5. The Boer’s eyes widened.

‘Wat julle gestuur het?’ said Clay. Who sent you?

The Boer blinked twice. ‘Fok jou.’

‘Who sent you, damn it?’

The Boer glanced towards the open door, the gale howling outside. Then he looked back at Clay and smiled through the blood. ‘Mandela het my gestuur,’ he slurred. Mandela sent me.

Clay pulled the trigger. Nothing. A jam. Or out of ammunition. He dropped the MP5, reached for the Glock in his waistband. And then the light was gone, and so was the Boer.

Clay scrambled to his feet, Glock out, the MP5 flapping about his neck, and staggered to the door. The man was already across the courtyard. Clay raised the G21, took aim through the slanting rain. The Boer hurdled the low wall and stumbled into the gorse just as Clay fired. Clay ran across the courtyard to the wall. A dark shape was lurching towards the cliff edge, about thirty metres away now, barely silhouetted against the sea. Clay steadied himself, raised his weapon. The Boer stopped, turned. He was right there, the abyss before him. Clay fired. The Boer pitched back and was gone.

3

A Talisman of Sorts

Clay walked back across the courtyard, the pain in his arm rising now as the endorphins and adrenaline burned away. The rain had relented and the cloud cover thinned. Moonlight sent shadows twitching across the landscape. He knelt once more beside the dead man and went through his pockets, extracting a wallet, three extra magazines for the MP5, a set of keys with a BMW ring, and a mobile phone, its standby light blinking red. Clay flipped open the phone and thumbed the scroll button. Nothing. The phone was password protected. He pulled out the SIM card and threw the phone over the cliff.

Back inside the cottage, he lit a lamp and inspected his arm. The knife, still lying on the floor, had sliced through the sleeve of his leather jacket and into his deltoid. He walked to the bathroom and opened the big cupboard. Crowbar’s idea of a medical kit resembled a military field hospital. There were giving sets, IV kits, every size and shape of bandage and compress, sutures, tape, morphine, coagulants, antibiotics by the carton, splints and slings. Clay took off the jacket, winced as he pulled the grey hooded sweatshirt over his head and pulled off his shirt. It was a clean slice across the arm, about three inches long, at least a couple of centimetres deep. Not too bad. He’d been lucky.

He stood and watched the blood ooze from the wound. As he’d lunged for Clay, the Boer had slipped on the wet floor and missed his target. Those new city shoes he’d been wearing, the shiny wet leather soles, had probably saved Clay’s life.

Which shoes you put on in the morning.

The side of the helicopter you got out of.

Where you decided to step. Here, or here.

These were the things that determined if you lived or died, whether you ended up in a coma for the rest of your life, lost your legs just above the knees, went home in one piece, physically at least. The brute physics of it – in retrospect always so pure and clear, something you could calculate, but in the causation so utterly unpredictable and, in the end, so spectacularly unfair. And for so long it had been for him the ultimate argument against the existence of God, and since he’d met Rania the ultimate argument for Him. For without His arbitrage, what possible explanation? What meaning?

One thing was certain. Allah, if he was out there, had a warped conception of justice, but a hell of a sense of humour.

Clay washed and dried the wound, snapped open a vial of disinfectant and doused the upper part of his arm, letting the sting nudge away this pointless philosophy. Soon he had the wound passably sutured and bandaged. He was getting good at working one-handed, much better than the bumbling frustration of the first weeks. He grabbed a box of painkillers, extra sutures, gauze and compresses, more disinfectant, a box of morphine, two clean towels and a box of surgical gloves, carried them into the kitchen and put them on the table.

Time was running. Clay threaded on a clean shirt, a dry hoodie, and hunched into the wet leather jacket. He opened up his bag, stuffed in the extra medical supplies. Then he grabbed the MP5 from the table, cleared the chamber, pulled out the magazine, and slid weapon and ammunition in with the supplies. From the drawer under the sink he fished out a box of .45 shells for the Glock and dropped them in with the other stuff. He walked to the fireplace, opened the flue, reached up and worked loose the blackened brick just above the baffle, pulled out a metal tin and extracted a fold of cash, sterling and euros, and two passports: Marcus Edward, Canadian, from Vancouver; and David Jackson, a Brit born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Both documents contained the same photograph of Clay, taken two and half months ago, the day after the killings in London, the eyes narrow, the mouth drawn, the hair chopped back. He looked like someone else, someone older. Clay stashed the money and passports in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He glanced at his watch. Just gone seven. Maybe ten and a half hours of good darkness left. He pulled a rain poncho from a hook near the door and pulled it over his head.

Not for the first time he wondered about this place he’d come to know so well. Hints of its recent past were everywhere. The half-used boxes of ammunition under the counter, the shredded railway sleepers in the buttressed shed outside, old copies of the South African Sunday Times yellowing in the coal scuttle, cupboards stocked with enough lamb stew and tuna to last a year. And now a dead man outside the front door.

He breathed, closed his eyes a moment. Then he walked to the bookshelf, pulled out an old hardback volume of Macbeth, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, killed the lamp and walked out the door for the last time.

Clay set off down the footpath at a run, the wind at his back, the rain gusting in sheets that flayed across the open blufflands, the gorse shivering with each whip of the lash. The car couldn’t be far. He was going to find it and put as much time and distance between himself and this place as he could.

As he ran, the telephone conversation of earlier that day replayed itself in his mind, the words finding cadence with his footfall.

Crowbar had answered first ring.

‘It’s me, broer.’

‘I told you to keep quiet,’ Crowbar – Koevoet in Afrikaans – had said. He’d sounded drunk.

Clay switched to the language of his childhood. ‘I haven’t heard from you.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Town.’

‘Kak, Straker. I fokken told you–’

Clay cut him off. ‘Have you heard from Rania?’

Silence, and then: ‘No. No, I haven’t. But there have been–’

‘What, Koevoet? Have been what?’

‘Articles in the paper. Written by Lise Moulinbecq. That’s her alias, isn’t it?’

He’d told her to keep quiet, stay hidden. Irony flooded through him, that particularly brutal nausea. ‘What articles?’

‘Something about Cyprus. Some sort of scam involving stolen antiquities.’

‘Get me out, Koevoet.’

‘Look, Straker.’ Crowbar coughed, deep and bronchial. ‘I have connections in the police. They don’t know who plugged Medved and his two thugs, but they know it happened in your hotel room. They want you for questioning.’

Killing Rex Medved had been the first right thing Clay had done in a long time, the first unselfish thing. But even as he’d pulled the trigger, something inside him had been pulling the other way, that promise he had made to himself a decade ago, after he’d fled the war, the insanity of a country tearing itself apart: no more killing. And then, deep in the wilds of Yemen, just five months ago, his day of reckoning had come. He’d met Rania. And that night when he’d killed Medved, it had been for something that mattered. It had been for her, for all those people in Yemen that Medved had screwed over, the dead kids, all the poisoned villagers whose minutes and hours and years had been chewed up and shit out into the open sewer of exploitation.

‘Be patient, broer,’ said Crowbar. ‘It’s going cold.’

‘Cold? A hundred thousand pounds cold?’

Crowbar laughed. ‘Not anymore, broer. Medved’s sister raised the reward to a million, just last week. And that’s just for information. She’s offering twice that for the hit, ja.’

Two million pounds. Enough to change a life: pay debts, buy freedom, solve problems. It changed everything, for him and for Rania, raised risk to the sixth power.

‘Congratulations, Straker. You’re finally worth something,’ slurred Crowbar. ‘If it wasn’t for this new job in Angola, might even take it on myself.’

After all these years, Crowbar was going back to Africa, this time to fight someone else’s war. As he’d said on the drive down to Cornwall, he didn’t know how to do anything else, and wouldn’t want to if he did. He’d even tried to recruit Clay into ‘The Company’ as he’d called it.

Clay heard Crowbar light a smoke and exhale.

‘This Medved woman is not the kind of person you want to get mixed up with, mind.’ The clink of glass, pouring. ‘Maybe you can just wait her out.’

‘You’re not listening, Koevoet.’

‘She’ll be dead in six months, by all accounts. Some degenerative liver disease. One failed transplant after another. She’s now convinced that the only thing that can save her is this lost icon thing she’s searching for.’

‘Icon?’ he said.

‘The Patmos Illumination, some twelfth-century Eastern Orthodox trinket. They say it was carved out of wood from the cross.’

‘Which cross?’

‘The cross, for fok’s sake, Straker. They say Christ’s blood soaked in, that you can still see the hole where they drove in the spike for his hand.’

‘Koevoet…’

‘They say it has the power to heal. You know, make the blind see, all that kak, ja.’

‘Koevoet.’

‘They say that it vanished, years ago. Wonder if it could help me.’

‘God damn it, Koevoet.’

‘Never been the same since I took that FAPLA bullet.’

‘I don’t have six months, Koevoet. I’m leaving. With your help or without it.’

‘Okay, seun. Go back to the cottage. Now. Stay put a while longer.’

‘I’ve got to get off this island, Koevoet. The weather’s killing me.’

Crowbar laughed, the rasp of his cigarette lungs. ‘Look, Straker, it’ll take a while to organise, a week maybe.’

‘A week? No way, broer.’

‘For fok’s sake, Straker,’ growled Crowbar through the line. ‘For once in your life can you just do what you’re told?’

He had trusted this man with his life so many times. Never had he known anyone cooler under pressure. Clay could see him there now, R4 gripped in one burly hand, massive golden-haired forearms bare in the Ovamboland sun, those blue eyes shining their battle light through the dust and the smoke, striding along the line as if he were on manoeuvres, the rest of them all scared shitless, staring up at him from the bottom of their holes, the metal ripping through the air all around like arcing electricity, him urging them up – return fire lads, steady now – like some old-time Regimental Sergeant Major. If you hadn’t seen it you would never have believed it, understood what courage that took, to expose yourself to that horrible mutilating reality, to see other men fall with shattered limbs and holed, jellied skulls, to will yourself into that cathedral of horrors. And Koevoet had done it repeatedly, routinely, until the men in the platoon came to look upon him as invulnerable, a talisman of sorts, immortal even, as others more careful were killed and maimed all around him.

‘Look, oom, I’m serious.’ Clay let the Afrikaans word of respect sink in. Uncle. ‘If they’re after me, they’re after Rania, too. I need to ontrek.’

‘Okay, Straker. Two days. Just get back to the safe house. Sit tight, ja. I’ll set it up.’

‘Air?’

‘No way, broer. You wouldn’t get past check-in. The airports are still being watched.’

‘How then?’

‘I’ll come down to get you. Tell you then.’

‘I’ll set another place for dinner. We can discuss Shakespeare.’

Koevoet grunted. ‘How you liking the place?’

In truth, the solitude of the little cottage had done Clay good. He missed Rania more intensely than he had ever thought possible, none of his defences, the thousand mile deserts, the numb Atlantics of disavowal, the sheer fucking hate, able to resist her. And after a while he’d stopped trying to fight it, started to live with it, this thing lodged inside him like some exquisitely jagged trajectile. Thus armed, each day without her became a second chance. He started drinking less, suffering at first, pushing through. He took long walks along the coast, avoiding towns and villages, covering twenty or thirty miles a day over chevron bluffs and shingle beaches, watching the gulls whirling in the breeze, the sun strobing through shot-holed cumulus onto a sheet-metal sea, getting strong again, daring to think about the future. Evenings he pushed makeshift weights, did sit-ups, chin-ups, push-ups till his muscles screamed. He practised in the shed with the silenced Glock. He read, hours by the fire, the rain washing the hours and nights away.

But that was finished. And as he ran through the night, he recalled his final words to Crowbar. ‘Two days,’ he’d said. ‘If you don’t show, I’m gone.’

Two days. A lifetime.

He’d done as Crowbar had asked. He’d gone back to the cottage, only to be met by these assassins. And now he was running for his life, half-blind through the gorse. It was raining hard, thick drops that crashed through the hedgerows and streamed from his eyes. Up ahead, a beam of light flashed across the cloud and was gone. The road was close.

He came to a gap in the hedgerow, pushed through and stepped onto a narrow lane, the tarmac sunk deep into the ground, a grassedged rut in the landscape. He stopped and peered through the rain, looking west, but there was only the dark, water-slicked road. He turned east and started walking. He’d covered fifty metres when he saw the outline of a car tucked into a pullout on the laneside. It was facing away from him, a large saloon, wide tyres. A BMW. Clay exhaled, relief surging through him. He took the keys from his pocket and started towards the car. Plans started forming in his head, destinations, routes. He’d head south to the coast. Find a boat. Try for the continent by sea.

He was within touching distance of the car when a light flared inside the passenger compartment. Clay froze. Then the sound of a window motor, the flick of a red cigarette end. One man, alone in the driver’s seat, waiting.

4

The Chasm between Now and Then

Clay stood next to the car, the ruts in the road streaming black water, the driving rain heavy in his eyes. Three miles behind him was the cottage on the cliff, which Crowbar had used as a safe house for the last five years of his tenure as chief European operative for the old DCC – South African Military Intelligence’s secret Directorate of Covert Collection. And a metre away, miles from the nearest village or farm, sat this black 500 series BMW with its lone occupant.

Clay